I think I started messing around with PHP in about October of 2000. At first I didn't really like the language since every other week or so new versions were out with "security fixes" of some kind, it didn't seem as mature a language as perl for example. However, PHP4 has changed most of that, although I still don't like the way PHP has things like automatic http form variables. Yes, you can disable that but it should never be enabled in the first place; a language that by default allows malicious users to pollute the variable space of any PHP script doesn't fill me with joy.

Still, I do some stuff in PHP, mainly to keep my skills honed since people are looking for PHP programmers. In fact I think it was a job advert on GameSpy I saw that prompted me to go out and learn PHP. So, onto my inevitable PHP projects. First up is a set of badly coded scripts for a friend's website that I hosted for him. Since the redesign I've dropped PHP from my site and the scripts have moved to his own webspace which has long since gone, so you're not gonna be seeing much of that around.

Hmm.. trying to remember what I did after that. If memory serves correctly I dabbled about trying to convert one of the early R1CHboard versions over to PHP but stopped half way through as I didn't know whether it would actually be worth it. I've done a few little PHP programs that make use of the "CGI" PHP interpreter and run as applications. One thing I like with PHP is the high level socket functions for things such as non-blocking sockets, which prompted me to make an IRC linkbot. Unfortunately the code for this has since been lost (along with numerous other small things) when I didn't realize the importance of backups.

My next big PHP project started around August 2001 in the form of a suite of utilities for the online strategy game planetarion. The planetarion crew provide the database of the planets and galaxies in the game available for anyone to use, so I was asked to make a bunch of utilities for the Elysium HQ (an alliance in the game) website. These included an overly complex parser of scans from the game, a huge database search, recall mailers and stats page. During the process of creating these I learned a lot more about SQL, mainly on the issue of where and when to use indexes, keys and such. The volume of data was so large that it would take almost 4 seconds to find a planet by the set of coordinates without any optimization. When I was through with this project, the time was down to 0.8ms :).

As with my perl page, I can offer PHP coding services at competitive prices. If you're interested, email me at . Please, serious enquiries only. I can no longer afford to work for free.

Well, I don't have anything downloadable yet. I would of put my linkbot and some other small utilities here, but they're no longer around. Maybe if I get inspired to remake them one day I will offer them.